Almost immediately I became a robot-magnet.

Robots were emailing me to tell me that I asked too little for my Jeep -- if only I clicked this link I could see how much it was really worth.

Robots were emailing me to tell me that there was another vehicle just like mine that was priced lower -- if only I clicked this link.

Geesh.

What was the first-written book of the New Testament?

If you answered "Matthew", you might want to read up a bit on what scholars currently know about the bible.

Most scholars believe First Thessalonians was the first book in the New Testament written. What about the Gospels? Is Matthew the first Gospel written? Wrong again. The first gospel written is widely believed to be Mark. Mark -- without the extra verses tacked on at the end -- is considered one of the best sources we have of what early Christians had for a bible.

First, from the size of me you can obviously tell I've been eating somebody's cooking. Secondly, as you can see, pair programming is alive and well here. My partner and I work long hours making sure the code is exactly right.

I don't want to get into any kind of personality dispute, but my partner has a tendency to lose interest and fall on the floor quite a bit. He's obviously the brains of the operation -- the strong silent type. I figure after all these years of being both a high-level consultant and a code monkey, it was time to join forces with my logical ally, sock monkey.

And you can't beat the swank evening work area we have -- couch, TV, music, munchies, and pillows. Sock monkey doesn't talk a lot, but I can tell from the way he looks that he is really liking our coding crib.

So for all those entrepreneurs out there who are reading the self-help startup books and are excited about your new application, it's wake-up time.

You will fail.

I thought somebody should tell you that, because we don't talk about it enough. Odds are, you will fail. That's doesn't mean there's anything wrong with your team, your idea, your market, or any of that. Stats show that most teams -- even teams that are rated highly in all success criteria -- do not meet the expectations of founders and investors. In fact, most kind of fizzle out after a while. This is not my opinion, it's just stats.

This is why investing in startups looks so comically tragic from the outside: nobody really knows what will work or not, so at the end of the day it's intuition and gut feelings. Of course it's funny: at an early stage investors are writing checks for real money based on less information than the average horse better has. They just try to dress it up more.

But whatever you do, however, keep trying! The world needs you. Entrepreneurs in startups are going to change the future of mankind, and they're going to do it over the next decade or two. At this time in our history, being an inventor and innovator is the highest calling anybody can have in life.

Just be honest with yourself about the odds. And when you do fail, whatever you do, don't go on the internet and write a long tirade about how everybody else is to blame. Sure, it will feel that way. Worse than people not giving you an honest shot (which sucks if you are used to being a hyper-achiever) is watching other folks take your ideas and get funding and run with them. That kind of pain can last a long time, I know.

The best way to look at it? It's a numbers game, just like sales. Books and positive reinforcement and all of that exist to keep you motivated and playing the numbers. So try to fail quickly. Try to pivot from your original idea to something else. If you can fail at 40 different startup ideas in your life, you're going to kick-ass at one of them. Learn to laugh at yourself and others -- all while you're working as hard and as smart as you can.

Just thought I'd say that. I think a lot of times it's easy to lose track of reality in this business.

As for me and my startup? I'm going to keep plugging away. I'm in startups because I want to make the world a better place, I want to help people, and I want to create, not just consume. When I die I don't won't to look back on all the times I quit, I want to look back on all the times I tried. Sure, quitting is logical at some point. But lots of times I've quit before I even really gave things a chance, and I don't want to do that any more. I try because trying is good, noble, and honest. I'd trade a life full of trying as hard as I could any day for a life where I tried half-assed and hit it big on startup #1 and then never created another good thing for mankind. In fact, most guys I've seen that sold out successfully on a startup lost track of who they were, drifting from one half-assed investment to another, never able to devote themselves to any one thing again. After all, why pour yourself into anything? You might fail!

But I'm no fool, either. Life (and the market) is not a meritocracy, and simply because I work hard and am a good person doesn't mean that anything good is going to happen. I'm not doing a startup to cash out in five years. I'm doing a startup because that's who I am. You try hard, life kicks you in the ass, you learn more, and then you try hard again.

Just try not to do things you'll regret while doing it.

We must imagine Sisyphus as happy.

You know who you are: you're the ones with the list of fallacious argument types on a little index card beside your monitor. Heck, you might even have a web site dedicated to "clear thinking" or something like that. You're the people who make the first post under an article and allege "Ad Homimem!" or "Appeal to Authority" and then spend the rest of the day having people call you names.

It's gotten so prevalent that sometimes when I'm on a busy internet site I feel like I'm at a lunch counter where people are yelling out orders: "#15: Gambler's Fallacy!" or "#7: Red Herring!" or "#23: Affirming the Consequent!"

Boy do I feel your pain.

Very well, actually.

Here's a brain dump of things I've learned over the last month. As always, take what you can use and leave the rest:

So, for instance, the next time you're looking for hamburger casserole recipes, hopefully you'll hit one of our sites. (If you go there you'll find there isn't anything salacious or untoward: it's just sharing some of the best recipes we have for hamburger casseroles to people who are looking for some)

This has been an eye-opening experience, so I thought I'd share a bit of what I've learned.

I've become a bit of a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) freak. Not a spammer or anything like that, but somebody who is beginning to understand how different pages get ranked different ways on different search engines. I'm starting to learn, for instance, how Google knows how to sort the results of your search.

I now understand why my blog will always be 3rd or 4th string: I have no focus. Or rather, I write like a normal person writes in their diary and not like a targeted money-making machine. There are guys who can do this: find a small niche and write the heck out of just stuff in that niche.

I am not one of those people.

I get bored easily, and the blog is mainly for me. So it's always going to be a mishmash of whatever I like. Cross out the plan for world-domination through blogging.

But there is an undeniably addictive nature to these games. Each game not only competes with other games that a person might play when bored, but it also competes with stuff a person should be doing.

So -- where's the line? Would you write a game that "entertained" doctors in surgery? (Put another way, if you were designing medical software, would you add game-like hooks to keep people's attention focused on it as a way of competing with other medical devices?)

Would you write a program that people would rather play than have lunch? A game that millions of people spend 40-hours-a-week on, like Wow? FaceBook's games are using players to perform hours and hours of menial, mindless tasks as they market and sell to them and other FB users. At what point do you cross the line between simply entertaining people and harmfully manipulating them and using them?

"list of electronic tools for lean and kanban teams http://bit.ly/6WW8cS #kanban"

(Kanban is a way of doing work where you use a board to show a "flow" of work and limit the number of activities in any one stage to a certain number)

To which a friend of his replied:

"Yeah, the whole idea of managing the pipeline in a structured way makes a lot of sense. In fact, strange as it sounds, I can see how you could apply the principles to a larger enterprise waterfall of iterative project[s]. You could use it to focus the team on the immediate pipeline...

Yikes!

I suppose something in the form of a XKCD comic or a couple of sentences might not be too much?

On one hand, I really feel for the guy, as evidenced by my own struggles with distractions. But on the other hand, something's out of whack.

If you're 24 and working on your startup with a couple of other college friends in a garage in SV the world is your oyster. But it gets complicated at 30, or 40. A lot of that has to do with being a high-tech worker living in a rural area. A lot of it has to do with having a family. When I talk about startups, or web applications, or SEO, or link arbitrage, or Angel capital, or social media, or hosting, or functional programming -- I might as easily be speaking in Greek for all the good it does. I simply don't live in a 21st century business culture.

So I play along.

I was thinking about this magical piece of paper today as I worked on my start-up. It's a beautiful day here today -- temps in the mid 60s (15C), low humidity, clear blue skies, and gorgeous autumn views. It's Saturday. All my "normal" friends are out shopping, spending time with their family, hiking, or otherwise enjoying the day.

I'm up at my office, with the flu -- a fever, sore throat, and stomach ache -- banging away at a hunk of code that, if I'm lucky, might one day show somebody sometime that somehow, someway, I have an idea that's worth pursuing. If I'm really lucky, it might actually provide some value to some users somewhere. But most of the time getting to profitably isn't as simple as hacking out some code; it's a multi-step process, of which an piece of code is only a very small and replaceable part. So it's extremely unlikely that one piece of code I write today is going to change the world. It's as absurd as working at a pig farm hoping to breed flying pigs.

So I've always been very generous with ideas. Whenever I have a good idea (about startups) I share it with others. Who knows? Maybe somebody can do something with it. I know I can't -- I have a dozen ideas a year and, because of my location in the woods, have so far been unable to form any team at all, much less a good or bad one.

But this past week I had a good idea. I mean a really, really good idea. This thing could rock! It's one of my top 3 ideas of the last ten years and I don't fall in love with ideas that easily.

So I thought about it: should I share my idea over on, say, HackerNews, where other startup founders can come by and critique and offer a helping hand? That's what I usually do -- I love the atmosphere over there where everybody (mostly) is trying to help each other out.

But then I thought -- heck no. My problem is that I can't execute at all, not a lack of ideas. If I share my ideas all I'm doing is throwing away ideas that I might be able to execute to teams already formed who can execute immediately. That's like making bullets and giving them to your enemies to shoot at you.

So I've changed my mind: at least about this one idea. This time I'm developing a prototype, then slowly sharing the idea with folks in an ever-expanding circle. If there is an execution gap between me and my possible competitors, I'm not about to give them a head-start.

Maybe I'm wrong -- maybe I'm just being short-sighted and looking at this the wrong way. But from my vantage point if I don't build it and somebody else does and it really takes off, I'll feel a lot better if I didn't help them doing it. At least not until I give myself first shot at it.

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd ?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd & thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack & Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke,
Shatter'd & sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse & hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

The Charge Of The Light Brigade
Alfred, Lord Tennyson